national security

TSA’s John Pistole Offers to Probe Senators: Shouldn’t He Buy Them Dinner First?

by Ryan Young on November 17, 2010

in Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Privacy

TSA chief John Pistole offered to give enhanced pat-downs to senators at a hearing today on TSA’s new screening policies. Over at the AmSpec blog, I break down the cause of the controversy and point out that there’s a lot more to the story than national security.

The curiously-named Rapiscan is one of two companies that makes full-body imaging machines. As former CEI Brookes Fellow Tim Carney reports, Rapiscan’s CEO is an Obama donor who accompanied the president on his recent trip to India.

Rent-seeking being a bipartisan phenomenon, the company also paid President Bush’s former Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, to promote Rapiscan’s full-body scanners.

Image credit: TalkMediaNews’ flickr photostream.

William Lind’s Absurd “Conservative Case” for More Transit [Waste]

by Marc Scribner on October 25, 2010

in Mobility

Over at enviro-blog Grist, conservative William Lind is interviewed on the subject of transit. Lind is an anomaly of sorts in the center-right transportation camp in that he backs many of the transit programs championed by leftists. Of course, just like the lefty backers, he gets virtually everything wrong in his diagnosis of what ails the American transportation system.

Lind, who wrote a recent book on the subject with the late Paul Weyrich (both of whom previously authored another error-laden book on the “conservative” case for transit), is a social conservative and has allowed his time spent working on defense issues to color his views about nearly everything. In particular, he regurgitates the myth that petroleum imports pose a serious national security threat:

The fundamental reason conservatives should support public transportation is because traditionally we’ve been strong on national security. The country’s single greatest national security vulnerability is our dependence on imported oil. For at least half of the American population, that dependence is complete; that is to say only half of the population has any public transit available at all. The first conservative virtue, as Russell Kirk argued, is prudence. It strikes us as wildly imprudent to make our mobility hostage to events in unstable parts of the world.

Of course, Lind fails to mention that the Department of Defense is the largest American consumer of fossil fuels. If you take as given his faulty assumption that oil imports fuel violent, anti-American extremists abroad, he should stick to criticizing America’s current interventionist foreign policy.

Next, he throws out some misleading statistics on government revenue and funding of different modes of transportation:

The latest Federal Highway Administration statistics show that user fees, including the gas tax, only cover 58 percent of the direct costs of highways. That’s not even looking at the vast indirect costs. And many rail — not bus, but rail — public transit systems are able to cover 50 percent and more of their expenses out of the fare box. Of course they’re all built with government money, mostly federal, more federal in the highways than transit. Highways get 80 percent federal; normally transit only gets 50 percent.

This is an argument based upon a lie by omission. What Lind fails to mention is that only 80 percent of “highway user fees” go back to actually benefiting those who pay the fees — drivers. The vast majority of the remaining revenue is siphoned off and allocated to wasteful transit systems. Another Lind omission is that the vast majority of Americans place a premium on driving, meaning that there are significant benefits (in terms of more satisfied preferences) from driving that cannot be captured by a simple fiscal accounting analysis. He does, however, identify a problem: too much federal control over America’s highway system. But his cure of more transit is far worse than the disease, and does not propose transferring federal control to the states.

And to get his somewhat rosy-looking transit figures, he lumps in rail and bus transit. Lind vastly prefers rail transit, but the difference between these modes is like night and day. Bus rapid transit (BRT), if properly designed, actually makes sense. But rail transit, outside of a few dense cities, virtually never makes sense. This is due to the facts that BRT is far cheaper and better addresses road congestion — by far the most serious transportation problem in America — while rail transit is more expensive and does not address congestion in any meaningful way. Lind’s main argument against more BRT — and I am not making this up — is that “[t]he population on board will be largely minority; conservatives usually are white or Asian. They’re not going to be comfortable surrounded by blacks and Hispanics.” (Emphasis added.) Seriously? This is the “conservative case” for more wasteful rail transit: too many non-whites ride buses?

He then goes on to repeat the bogus claim that rail transit tends to boost the value of abutting or nearby private property (again, this is the exception, not the rule). But for Lind, the efficiency of the transportation system is secondary. Socially engineering society to fit his unhinged, narrow world view comes first.

“Not fit for combat,” my article in Forbes

by Michael Fumento on November 19, 2009

in Odds & Ends

It’s not exactly what Pogo meant when he said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” But it works out that way. The greatest threat to our national security isn’t terrorist groups, rogue nations with nukes or China. It’s an inability to stock our armed forces with top-quality men and women because too many applicants are uneducated and overweight.

About three-fourths of the nation’s 17- to 24-year-olds can’t join the military, largely due to these problems, says a report from Mission: Readiness, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. It’s one reason President Obama is dithering over whether he should order an additional 40,000 troops to Afghanistan. Today we have just 1.4 million people in the active military, whereas in 1944 we had over 2 million serving in France alone, out of a U.S. population less than half its current size.

Read my Forbes article to find out how our public education system is a serious threat to national defense.

Data deflates threat-multiplier hype

by Marlo Lewis on October 21, 2009 · 1 comment

in Features, Global Warming, Zeitgeist

“Climate change is a threat multiplier” is the new trendy rationale for Kyoto-style energy rationing. One hears little these days about Al Gore’s nightmare vision of death and destruction from ever more powerful and frequent hurricanes, catastrophic sea-level rise, or a warming-induced climate shift into a new ice age. This story line is too implausible for most grownups to swallow or patronize, no matter how desperate they are to look green.

The new, more ‘nuanced’ rationale for energy rationing is that global warming will aggravate several pre-existing environmental and health threats that cause or contribute to instability and conflict. We’re supposed to fear that a warming world will be much more violent and dangerous. Supposedly, “even the generals are worried” that U.S. security forces will be overstretched, even overwhelmed, by crisis after crisis after crisis. Unless, of course, Congress comes through with bigger and bigger appropriations for DOD! 

This is bunkum, as I discuss here, here, and here. Today, I want to pour more cold water on threat-multiplier hype, courtesy of my colleague, environmental researcher Indur Goklany.

Goklany (“Goks” to his friends) recently responded to an article in the Economist arguing that global warming exacerbates conditions (drought, flooding, hunger, insect-borne disease) in poor countries that already impede their development. From which it follows (although the article doesn’t spell it out) that climate change increases the likelihood of state failure, violence, and war.

Chief among the conditions that will allegedly become worse in a warming world are drought and flooding. ”Regardless of whether this is the case,”  Goks writes in his letter to the Economist, “deaths from droughts have declined 99.9% since the 1920s, and 99% from floods since the 1930s” [1]. Yet alarmists tell us that the warming of the latter half of the 20th century was unprecedented in the past 1300 years.

In view of the long-established and overwhelming trends towards greater safety, despite allegedly unprecedented warming, it is difficult to believe that droughts and floods will be a major cause of violent conflict in coming decades. That is especially the case when, as noted previously, nations faced with water shortages typically cooperate and trade, not come to blows.

More broadly, Goks points out, all the long-term trends in environmental factors affecting development are positive:

In fact, access to safe water, improved sanitation, crop yields, and life expectancy has never been higher in the history of mankind.[2] This is true for both the developing and developed worlds. Much of this has been enabled, directly or indirectly, by economic surpluses generated by the use of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas generating activities such as fertilizer usage, pumping water for irrigation, and use of farm machinery. And crop yields, in particular, are also higher today than ever partly because of higher concentrations of CO2, without which yields would be zero.

Some day — who knows when?– “even the generals” will outgrow climate hysteria and get back to worrying about threats they actually know how to do something about.

Will climate change cause water wars? Will Waxman-Markey enhance U.S. energy security? No and No.

by Marlo Lewis on September 21, 2009

in Energy, Ethanol, Global Warming

Last week, on the free-market energy blog MasterResource.Org, I posted a two-part column on climate change and national security. In a nutshell, I argued that global warming is likely not an important geopolitical or military “threat multiplier,” and that the national security risks of climate change policies likely outweigh those of climate change itself.

One of the great things about “publishing” on the Internet is that readers can quickly and easily share other insights and information the author had not considered.

Climate scientist and fellow blogger Chip Knappenberger called my attention to a remarkable essay in Nature magazine by Wendy Barnaby, editor of People & Science, the journal of the British Science Association — and to Chip’s review of Barnaby’s essay on WorldClimateReport.Com.

One of the principal ways climate change supposedly acts as a “threat multiplier” is to intensify drought and water shortages, leading to crop failure, famine, and armed conflict within and among nations. Barnaby had written a book about biological warfare, and the publishers suggested she write a book about the coming century of “water wars.” 

At the outset, she assumed that water scarcity is a signifcant source of armed conflict in the world – a pervasive problem just waiting to be ‘threat multiplied’ by climate change. The book was to include a history of water wars, but, as she dug into her topic, she found there wasn’t much history to write about. ”Cooperation, in fact, is the dominant response to shared water resources,” she discovered. The data are overwhelming:

Between 1948 and 1999, cooperation over water, including the signing of treaties, far outweighed conflict over water and violent conflict in particular. Of 1,831 instances of interactions over international fresh water resources tallied over that time period (including everything from unofficial verbal exchanges to economic agreements or military action), 67% were cooperative, only 28% were conflictive, and the remaining 5% neutral or insignificant. In those five decades, there were no formal declarations of war over water (emphasis added).

It is true that many nations are water-stressed, but this has not meant that their people must either perish or go to war to seize another country’s water supplies. Usually, it means that countries cooperate and import “virtual water” in the form of agricultural produce. It takes lots more water to grow crops than it does to supply households with drinking water. So where water is scarce, people tend to substitute grain imports for home-grown produce. Israel, Jordan, and Egypt are a case in point:

Israel ran out of water in the 1950s: it has not since then produced enough water to meet all of its needs, including food production. Jordan had been in the same situation since the 1960s; Egypt since the 1970s.  Although it’s true that these countries have fought wars with each other, they have not fought over water. Instead, they all import grain. As [U.K. social scientist Tony] Allan points out, more ‘virtual’ water flows into the Middle East each year embedded in grain than flows down the Nile to Egyptian farmers.

Climate change-related drought would pose challenges to resource managers but should not lead to armed conflict where nations are free to cooperate and trade. (As noted in my MasterResource column, cap-and-trade treaties require carbon tariffs for enforcement — a recipe for conflict and trade war rather than cooperation and trade.)

Barnaby’s conclusion is worth reproducing in full:

Book or no book, it is still important that the popular myth of water wars somehow be dispelled once and for all. This will not only stop unsettling and incorrect predictions of international conflict over water. It will also discourage a certain public resignation that climate change will bring war, and focus attention on what politicians can do to avoid it: most importantly, improve the conditions of trade for developing countries to strengthen their economies. And it would help to convince water engineers and managers, who still tend to see water shortages in terms of local supply and demand, that the solutions to water scarcity and security lie outside the water sector in the water/food/trade/economic development sector. It would be great if we could unclog our stream of thought about misleading notions of ‘water wars.’

Waxman-Markey would increase U.S. dependence on petroleum product imports

As discussed in my column on MasterResource.Org, U.S. dependence on oil, including oil imports, is not a “crisis.” Nonetheless, many eco-warriers and defense hawks claim that it is. They also claim that Waxman-Markey would enhance U.S. energy security by inaugurating the transition to a “beyond petroleum” economy.

Well, another colleague sent me a report showing that Waxman-Markey would make us more dependent on petroleum product imports.

The report, prepared by EnSys Energy for the American Petroleum Institute, finds that by 2030, Waxman-Markey would:

  • Significantly increase U.S. refining costs;
  • Reduce U.S. refining volume by up to 4.4 million barrels per day (mbd);
  • Reduce annual U.S. refining investments by up to $89.7 billion (up to an 88% decline in investment);
  • Reduce refinery utilization rates from 83.3% to as low as 63.4%;
  • Create competitive advantage for non-U.S. refineries; and, hence
  • Increase U.S. reliance on petroleum product imports.

EnSys analyzed three scenarios: a “Base Case” (EIA’s reference case projection of future liquid fuels supply and demand without climate legislation); a “Basic Case” (EIA’s analysis of Waxman-Markey assuming timely development of key low-emission technologies and no severe policy constraints on the use of both domestic and international offsets); and a No International/Limited Case (EIA’s analysis of Waxman-Markey assuming limited access to international offsets, and no deployment of key technologies beyond EIA’s reference case).

Okay, now that we understand the terminology, let’s look at some graphs from the EnSys report. First, the impact of Waxman-Markey on U.S. refinery output:

ensys-throughput

Next, the impact on U.S. refining investments:

ensys-investment

Next, the impact on petroleum product imports by volume:

ensys-product-import-volumes

Next, the impact on petroleum product imports by percent:

ensys-import-volume-by-percent2

Finally, the impact of Waxman-Markey on U.S. refining global market share:

ensys-regional-impacts1

Bottom line for “energy security” mavens: Waxman-Markey grows foreign refining output at the expense of U.S. output, and increases U.S. dependence on petroleum product imports.

The EnSys report very likely understates the impact of Waxman-Markey on U.S. refining. A modeling study can only estimate how carbon constraints will affect refining via their impact on fuel prices. Models cannot estimate how carbon-constraints might affect refining via their impact on investor psychology.    

Investors can get spooked when government declares regulatory warfare on an industry, and the Waxman-Markey bill does just that. Consider the gross disparity between the refining industry’s share of covered emissions (43%) under Waxman-Markey and its share of emission allowances (2.5%).

ensys-allocations-vs-emissions  

Investors cannot be blamed if they view Waxman-Markey as the proverbial “writing on the wall” for the U.S. refining industry. From this I conclude that Waxman-Markey’s adverse impacts on U.S. refining – and thus on the volume and percent of petroleum product imports – could be substantially greater than those EnSys projects.

Conclusion

Waxman-Markey will not take us “beyond petroleum.” Instead, it will make gasoline more costly to consumers while making America more dependent on imported petroleum products.

Climate policies endanger U.S. national security

by Marlo Lewis on September 16, 2009

in Global Warming, Sanctimony

The global warming scare campaign goes through phases. Warmists are collectivists, and they buzz like a hive. The overall narrative of doom does not change, but every couple of months or so the hive settles on a different scare to buzz about most loudly.

That’s the best way to get media and public attention, after all. Single out one alleged global warming terror, publicize the heck out of it until ”everybody knows” the “crisis” is “even worse than scientists previously believed,” and then move on to the next scare-of-the-month. The intended effect, as H.L. Mencken put it, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Previously featured scares include killer heat waves, malaria epidemics, more powerful hurricanes, catastrophic sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and, my personal favorite, a shutdown of the Gulf Stream leading to a new ice age. Some of these have been scares-of-the-month more than once — a form of recycling, if you will. 

You might think that after so many years of hearing about so many ways global warming is going to wreck the planet, the American people would be “clamorous to be led to safety” and demand cap-and-trade as the salvific path to a “clean energy future.”

But no, the American people aren’t buying it — at least not enough to overcome their repugnance to a massive new energy tax, which, many now understand, is what cap-and-trade boils down to.  

So proponents of the Waxman-Markey bill need a new scare du jour, and this month it’s “climate change threatens U.S. national security.” Instead of warning, implausibly, that we’re going to fry, drown, blow away, or freeze, the new sales pitch is more sophisticated. 

Here’s what they say. Climate change is a “threat multiplier.” It aggravates several problems – poverty, drought, famine, coastal flooding – that already foster instability and conflict. A warming world will be plagued by more frequent and more intense conflicts among and within nations.

A coalition of eco-warriers and defense hawks has formed to push the message. What each side gets out of this strange-bedfellow coalition is obvious. The defense professionals get mission creep — an expansive rationale to justify new DOD and intelligency agency programs, capabilities, and activities, all funded by the taxpayer, from now until 2100 and beyond, regardless of the actual geopolitical and military threats facing the country. Greenies, for their part, gain allies respected by conservatives, who up to now have opposed Kyoto-style “global governance” and greater political meddling in energy markets.

On the free-market energy blog, MasterResources.Org, I have written a two-part essay titled, ”Even the Generals Are Worried! Mission Creep, Climate Change and National Security.” Part 1 shows that the “threat multiplier” argument is hype. Part 2 shows that climate change policy poses greater risks to national security than does climate change itself.

Young in American Spectator: “Unnecessary Baggage”

by Gary Howard on July 7, 2009

in Personal Liberty

CEI Fellow in Regulatory Studies, Ryan Young, talks about the latest bill in Congress to regulate your carry-on habits.  Find the article here.

Obama Inaugural Speech Spurns Notion of Apologizing

by Christine Hall on January 20, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming

Listening to President Obama’s inaugural address today, I was struck by his rhetoric with respect to “apologizing for our way of life.” It was a bit unclear, but hopefully he was referring, not only to threats to our national security, but to energy consumption — the notion that we (Americans, westerners) should not apologize for the energy we consume, which enables us to live better, more productive, healthy lives.

With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

As my colleagues have noted, many of Obama’s energy and environment appointments have a long track record of supporting anti-energy policies, such as renewable energy mandates, that drive up energy costs for the rest of us. But, for a moment, it would be nice to think that our new president doesn’t want us to apologize for the energy that empowers all of us to live better lives.